The Need for New Stories, Revisited — Van Jones

[Music] Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome back to the FOSS Podcast. Last June, I was honored to welcome activist and political commentator Van Jones onto the FOSS Podcast to discuss the power of stories to elicit positive change in the world. Now I have some very exciting news. Earlier this week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos awarded Van with his inaugural Courage and Civility Award, which honors outstanding leaders who aim high, pursue solutions with courage, and do so with civility. Van received $100 million to support the charitable organization of his choice. It's an incredible recognition of Van's leadership on social, political and environmental issues, and I thought it would make a great occasion to re-release our episode with Van, which is truly one of my favorites. For those of you who aren't familiar with Van, here's what I said about him last time. Van Jones, a graduate of Yale Law School, has a long list of professional accomplishments that include co-founding six nonprofit social justice organizations, hosting four documentary and political commentary shows on CNN, authoring three New York Times bestselling books, championing two landmark acts of Congress, and even working for President Obama as his Green Jobs Advisor. As Van and I discuss in this episode, he credits much of his driving sense of mission and values to the stories that inspired him as a child, which also helped inspire his belief as stated in the tagline of his production studio Magic Labs Media that the Earth is made of stone, but the world is made of stories. For over two decades, Van has been using that belief in the power of stories, as well as a deep understanding of how to wield them, to build a better, cleaner, and more equitable future for all Americans. And so, without further ado, I'm very honored to welcome Van Jones to the Future of Storytelling podcast. Van Jones, it's such an honor and pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for being here. I'm honored to be here. It's great to see you. So nice to see you again. So I read that as a kid, you read a lot of comic books. Mm-hmm. True story. Who were your favorite superheroes? Well, the experiment. I grew up when Marvel Comics were still mainly an underground phenomenon. You had to be a super nerd, a super geek to know who the X-Men were. And I mean, you were going to get a wedgie at some point. That's the master's for sure. Just by definition, if you knew any of that world, that universe. But I really grew up as a skinny, nerdy, bookish, emotional kid on the edge of a small town in rural West Tennessee in the '48s, so in the '70s, '80s, when there was no upside for being a nerd. Now, you can be a nerd, you can be a geek. It's cool. There's Silicon Valley. It works. You know, as well I am. I mean, you can make it work. No. You were just a bully magnet with your weirdo comic books and Dungeons & Dragons or whatever it was. It's trying to survive high school. And that's how I grew up. Well, we shared that because I was a crazy Marvel collector. Like, I lived for those. And favorites personally. Yes, Daredevil. Yes, X-Men. New Cage, Power Man, Iron Fist. Like the more obscure, the more I love to collect them and read them and consume them. Would you say that some of those stories and some of those characters were influential for you? Have they continued to live out and play out in your life? I wouldn't say influential. I would say fundamental. The idea of the X-Men in particular, you know, these kind of weirdo kids with these kind of special abilities and they were sworn to protect a world that hated and feared them. Sworn to protect a world that hated and feared them. There's no better kind of framework for being an African-American activist, you know, in the US context than that. So you're in this world that doesn't appreciate you. Maybe it's afraid of you. And yet you've committed yourself as the X-Men did to like the most noble of purposes. The kind of power fantasy of the marginal nerd to be able to become something great and do something great is I think at the root of the whole comic book, Ethic, and it's my ethic. And with great power comes great responsibility. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, Peter Parker and Uncle Ben telling him that. Uncle Ben. Yeah, Uncle Ben telling Peter Parker that. You know, that is really my ethic. I have so much respect for Stanley. And I think that his ability to kind of humanize the genre. I think that was really important. And I took all of that and the nobility of the heroic ethic of Stanley is my heroic ethic as well. Nicely said. So I have a long relationship with you that you don't necessarily know about. So I was at the Bioneers Conference in 2003. Wow. Life changing. Life changing because I will never forget the speech that you gave there where you, I came there as an environmental activist. And you opened my eyes to the need for social and prison reform and social activism and you took those two movements and you tied them together. You literally said a movement that is courageous and visionary on the environment, but cowardly and ignorant about the social issues will fail. And I remember that and I actually cried with you during that speech that you gave when you so honestly and authentically shared how passionately you felt about this and how moved you were and nobody. There wasn't a dry eye in the house as you gave that talk. I mean, honestly, I was like, where did you come from? Did you come from? And how did you learn to get up there and give that talk? I speak from the heart like that. I appreciate that. Well, first of all, not easily. You know, I had a speech impediment growing up and you can still hear a remnants of it. I was incredibly shy. Beyond shy. I grew up going to public schools. I grew up in the black church. There's this thing in the black church and I'm not saying it's to be racially offensive or divisive, but there is something called the black church. You've never been in one. You know, it ain't the same as the white church. And there's this sort of theological position that I just called the hallelujah anyhow position. No matter what's happened during the week, no matter how many times we've been mistreated or discriminated against or called horrible names or even lynched or even falsely accused or even jailed or killed, hallelujah anyhow. You're not going to steal our joy. You're not going to steal our dignity, hallelujah anyhow. But because I grew up in such a weird place, you know, Jackson Tennessee who's ever heard of that, then I went up going to law school at Yale who hasn't heard of that. And then I moved to the Bay Area and not to go work downtown for a big firm, but to work essentially in low income communities with transgender people and homeless people and kids in trouble. And all this kind of got shaken up inside of myself and it kind of came out as this commitment to protecting things that are sacred no matter where they are. Like I could see how the solution for the earth and the solution for people with the same thing, solution for the planet, solution for the people, same thing, that you could fight poverty and pollution with the same thing. And then I got invited to go to Bioneers and I just had so much to say and when I got there, I looked out, that's probably the biggest audience I ever spoken of front of. And I'm looking out and it's clearly mostly white, very affluent, but with these big hearts. And I think to myself, if I can just get these folks to care about these kids from Oakland, there's just nothing that we can't do. I mean, that was probably the most consequential speech of my life because I just, some of it just came pouring out of me into that moment and it created ultimately the pathway that led me to the Obama White House and everything else, you know, that was the farthest thing in our mind at the time. But that was a really, really important moment. So it seems to me that you then went on this path. I know the whole story about going to the White House. I know the story about getting pushed out of the White House. And now most people know you because of the work you do on CNN as a political correspondent or commentator. So what people don't realize because they don't think about commentators is getting shit done, right? They think about them as people talk for a living and don't really do anything. And you are unbelievably effective as a person who gets important things done. There was the Green Jobs Act. Sorry, I don't remember the exact name of it from. Sure. Green Jobs Act 2017. Alright, I do remember it, okay? And then the first stepped act, first big major legislation for prison reform in a decade. That was later in 2017, is that right? - Yeah, and we got Trump 2018, we got Trump to sign it, which was unbelievable. Like, yeah, it's so funny because I, you know, the Green Jobs Act of 2007, we got George W. Bush to sign that to get green jobs, you know, all across the country. And then the first step act, the criminal justice reform piece, we got Trump to sign. - It's crazy, and also in an age when Congress is just like divided and in a standstill, right? Shut down because of the partisan rancor. And yet you've been able to get these major things passed or be a important part of doing that. What's the formula for getting real progress made? I mean, what I have tried to do is look for the areas of common ground between the right and the left and put my work there. Now, that's a choice. It's not the only choice, not the only valid choice. There are people who have, and I think with great justifications, they listen. We can't be friends. Your stash in babies from their mothers at the border. You're trying to take away women's rights over their bodies. You're trying to exclude people from the country because they're Muslim. We're not gonna be friends. I got to fight you. And so there are people who've gone to the battleground and they are fighting hard, and I respect that. That's important. I played that battleground role in times in my life. But for me and my heart, there are areas of common ground. And what happens is when you don't look for the common ground, the people who suffer the most are the poor, the marginal, the vulnerable, the addicted, the afflicted, the incarcerated, those are the people who lose out. So we just built a liberty and justice for all movement, a left and right movement, to get something done. And through the Dream Corps, which I founded, which has cut 50 by a partisan campaign on criminal justice, plus the reform alliance. I'm the founding CEO there. Back by Jay-Z, back by Meek Mill, back by Robert Smith, Robert Kraft, et cetera. We've passed, over the past 36 months, we've passed almost two dozen criminal justice bills on a bipartisan basis, including in red states like Georgia. We got Trump to sign a bill, the first step back. They've got 8,000 people out of the federal prison system earlier with many more to come. Now the federal system is the smallest it's been and a couple of generations now. Doesn't mean that I don't fight Trump on the stuff I disagree with him on. Doesn't mean I'm going to vote for a Republican. But it does mean that on issues like criminal justice and addiction that hits both sides of the aisle and generational poverty, which hurts people from Appalachia to the hood and the Barrio and the reservation all the way back around. There are things we can work on together. So let me ask you about one of the other things that you've built. You have a production company, Magic Labs Media. And I love the tagline for that company. The Earth is made of stone, but the world is made of stories. If we want new facts, we need new fiction. Can you tell me a little bit where you-- why that's the tagline and how you came up with that? As just came to me in prayer, you know, pray a lot, meditate a lot. People look at what's going on in the US and maybe throughout the West politically with some horror. No matter what side you're on, just the level of divisiveness and dysfunction and disrespect is so high. This overwhelming narrative that the problem is somebody else in solution is to smash them to bits is everywhere in the culture. It's a spiritual problem and a cultural problem and a narrative problem. Well, then that's where we need to be putting a lot more energy and attention in time. And so Magic Labs, we've done-- we've got this virtual reality project where we let you be in the body of a small black child sitting on the front seat of a car. You blink awake and you pick up your hands or your hands are like the hands of a small black child. You look to your left and your dad is a big black guy, Winston Duke who played Embaku in the Black Panther-- Marvel, Marvel movie. And he's your dad and he's driving the car. And he's joking with you and he's telling you funny stories and everything's going great. And then the light starts flashing behind you and you get pulled over. And you get to witness the reenactment of an actual traffic stop from the point of view of a small black child on the front seat of a car. And it's not gruesome, but it's very disturbing. And we took that virtual reality content to 1/2 minutes to CPAC, the conservative political action conference with, I don't know, 6,000, 7,000 Trump supporters. And we had law enforcement people. So we have video of people taking off their mega hats and putting on our advisors. Taking off their NRA hats. They make America great hats and putting on our advisors. And 2 1/2 minutes later, going, wow, I literally never thought about what-- when I use these police interactions, and of course, I always decide more with law enforcement because I understand they've got to protect themselves. They've got their own families to come home to. But I just had never thought about what it would be like to be a child in that car without having to your dad. Now, that's not going to change anybody votes, but it can change-- because it's not going to create political agreement, but it can create understanding. And that's what you can do with culture. I love that you're using VR and experimenting with it. At the future of storytelling, last year, the piece that won the false prize for bridging the divide. It was a category that we had. It was a piece called "I'm a Man," which was this beautiful interactive VR piece by Derek Ham. And you became a sanitation worker in 1968 in Memphis, peacefully marching with your sign that said, I am a man. It was a series of vignettes. And this is the strike-- the sanitation worker strike that Dr. Martin Luther King came to to support the strikers. And in the piece, he's assassinated. You don't see that, but it happens in the course of this piece. And so you go from being part of peaceful protests to an evening when there's riots in the streets. You as a viewer, you are this African-American man. Again, you can tell from the color of your hands. And the piece ends with you on the streets now. And police cars pull up. It's evening. Lights headlights are focused on you. And the police come out and say, put your hands up. And you are placed in this moment of moral decision to physically raise your hands during this VR piece or not. And you're filled with rage from what's happened and sadness. And that was an amazing, emotional and empathetic moment for a white guy who's not had the police point guns at him before. But probably for anybody, really, anyway, just another example of a similar kind of use of the medium for this purpose. I wanted to ask, you work so beautifully across so many media, television, podcasts, radio, documentaries, journalism, VR. Do you have a favorite? Do you think that there's one that's more useful for the kind of influence and impact and change you're trying to accomplish? Well, I appreciate what you said. I was also written a couple of books I'm proud of. But the-- Of course, three New York Times bestsellers. All available on Amazon.com or wherever you buy books. But it makes me proud to hear you say what you just said. I mean, given your role, has kind of like the preeminent curator of this whole kind of world that I'm trying to be a part of. So I appreciate this acknowledgement. What I'm proudest of of all the things I've been able to do in media is an eight-part series-- a docky series I did called the Redemption Project. It didn't win any big awards. It didn't get great ratings. But it was the best that I could do in the domain of television, commercial television. Very hard to do meaningful shit in commercial television. And what it was was, we found instances of violent crime and we found the victim, the person who had been hurt, or often the surviving family member. And we found the person who had done wrong. The person who had done wrong sometimes was a vehicular homicide. Sometimes it was shooting no sexual crimes, but crimes of violence. The ones who really wanted to make amends and who had often made some change in their life really wanted to talk to the person who they had hurt. And so we facilitated eight of these dialogues where we would bring the person who had been hurt or the surviving family member either into a prison or into a community center where they were going to meet with the person who had completely changed their lives in a moment of rage or stupidity. And we just filmed them talking. And like I said, it didn't get big ratings, didn't get big awards. But I'm so proud that CNN put it on the air. And if anybody ever wants to know what is Van Jones' belief, that's it. People reaching across some of the toughest lines possible. and finding some kind of hope. What I most like to do is just to talk in front of real audiences, which now with this pandemic, maybe we'll never do again, because you can go on a long journey with people. You know, 30, 45 minutes, you can really tell a lot of stories. You can also, you can just be silent. You have to take more than a second or two. Somebody's gonna jump in. It's like it's just not allowed. TV is a very noisy, colorful medium. You know, you had a room with 500 students or 2,000 conference attendees. You could just shut up for a second and just let what you just said sink in. And you can get you a much deeper place with people. And so I love being able to talk just to real audiences. I have become incredibly comfortable, though, on live television. You're really good on it. Well, that's very kind of. So fluid. Yeah. I appreciate it. I cheat. And I'll tell you how I cheat in a minute. But the reality is that during the 2016 election, I was on TV so much, so long, you know, you'd be on TV for 12 hours, 16 hours. And something just switched in me where I just became comfortable. And I know what a gift it is to be on television. Even in this era where people are moving away from TV, everybody's on their devices or whatever, there's still something about television. It's still the mass media. Yeah. And I know the importance of my voice in that medium. You're talking to half a million million people on an off night for CNN. Right. A big night. You might hit 14 million. Election night. Yeah. Election night. 80 million. 80 million people. I mean, there are rock stars and celebrities that never talked to an audience that big. And I cheat, by the way. Okay. So what? How do you cheat? I want to hear that. The way that I cheat is. I cheat on a very, very smart friend who I have on a WhatsApp thread. And while I'm sitting there watching the debate or watching the primers, whatever, I don't. No way. It's like having it written on your sleeve or something. Exactly. You're literally pulling it out in the middle of the test. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm watched. So they all start arguing and debating with each other on the WhatsApp thread. And so I just steal. I just steal from my friends. And people think I'm so smart that I'm not, but I'm smart enough to have smart friends. I love it. That's like you're literally like looking over someone's shoulder doing. Yeah. Getting an answer off their test. Well, 30 people's shoulders. 30 people's shoulders. So it's allowed. I love it. So it's allowed. So I've again had the pleasure to see you a number of times speak publicly. And I've seen you in many of those appearances where either a purple shirt or a purple tie. Can you tell me why? Because it's an honor of prints. I never wore a purple before he died. He used to wear orange or red. I think they kind of matched my skin tone a little bit better. But when I left the Obama White House under fire because of my left wing radical past kind of catching up to me, I've been a berserkly radical proud of it, too, by the way. In my 20s, I was with every ism. I could find anarchism, communism, many kind of ism that was against the system ism. I was for it. And very proud of myself to be so idealistic and passionate as a young person. But the positive thing was a guy named Prince called me and took me in. So I went for working with the president to work with the prince. And prince used to always say, "In most countries, Van, that's a promotion." So we had a great run, almost seven years together, changed my life. Great guy. And so every since he passed, I wore a purple tie. I had one purple tie. Not a purple shirt in my closet. Nothing purple. I thought it would be too corny for me to be like his guy doing his philanthropy and all his social do-good-or-stuff and be wearing purple. I thought that would be like too. So it had nothing purple. I had one purple shirt when he died. So I put that shirt on, I went on air and disclosed. In fact, we were even working together because he was very, very private person. To be people even know he was giving way so much money and doing all these things. And then ever since then, I've been almost four years now. Because it has been four years now. I've worn a purple shirt and/or purple tie every time. So tell me about a story that helped you believe in the power of stories. Is there something that really shifted your thinking? You know, that's all I had with stories. I mean, I'm not a rich man's child, but all I had was stories. The black community is really an oral tradition. Storytelling is a big deal in the South period and then certainly in the black community. The future of human civilization is the future of storytelling. Human civilization is a story. Which human civilization has told itself a story. And that's what led it, create irrigation or sense of the mind of the moon or create rights for women or whatever. It's the future of humanity is the future of the story which I'll ourselves. And I think this virus has come to teach us about oneness and wellness. That's what I believe. In a pandemic, that pandemic means all everybody. You can't have your Wall Street job unless somebody who's a woman of color, usually from another country, is willing to wipe your grandmother's behind in a nursing home and feed your kid. Share your child. And take care of your child as an Annie or as a school teacher. That Amazon package can't get to your door unless a human being comes to your door and you better hope that human being is not sick. And suddenly it turns out we're all one. And so this idea of oneness and wellness and listen. The creator already sent a bunch of profits before to tell us about oneness. Don't be mad now that we got a hard lesson. I mean, we had all the great profits in the sages and the Oprah Winfries and the Fred Rogers and the big birds and and and Kermt of Frogs and all these great people have come. Ellen DeGeneres and everybody else has come to tell us let's be one. So now we have to have it as a tough lesson. But if we learn this lesson and we put the least of these at the center, the people in the prisons and the homeless shelters and the women shelters and the foster homes who can't shelter in place and who the virus will just come through again and come through again and come through again. You'll never get rid of this virus. If you don't deal with the people at the very, very bottom, make sure that they're healthy, make sure that they're safe. Then if we learn the lesson and we govern ourselves accordingly, then a new story will come. And the next normal will be a story that lets us have a human civilization at peace with itself and with the earth. And that's what the century is about and that's what the new story has to be about and I'm proud to be in the journey with you. Amen. Man, we need more superheroes today and that's basically one of the lessons I take from this conversation and you are one of my personal heroes. And the same back at you, brother. You're fighting a good fight. You're out there using your super skills as a storyteller to fight for truth justice and the American way. Absolutely. Thank you, brother. Hey, thanks. Well, happy back sometime and let's stay together. Appreciate you. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Van Jones as much as I did. If you'd like to learn more about Van or watch the moving video of his speech at the Bioneers Conference in 2003, you can do so on our website, fost.org. There's also a link to the appropriate page in this episode's description. Thank you for being part of the future of storytelling family. If you liked this episode, please be sure to subscribe to our podcast, give us a review and share it with others. A heartfelt thank you to Van Jones and to our talented production partner, charts and leisure. I hope you'll join us next week for another conversation. Until then, please be safe, be strong and story on.